In recent years flash memory devices such as solid state drives (SSDs) has seen growing success in the primary storage markets. SSD is a flash memory packaged in hard-drive form.
An SSD, also called as solid-state disk, is a data storage device that uses flash memory to store data persistently. SSD technology provides an interface that is compatible with traditional block I/O hard disk drives. However, it does not employ any moving mechanical components, which distinguishes it from traditional magnetic disk technology, such as hard disk drives (HDD) (see:www.wikipedia.org).
SSDs are more costly than HDDs per storage unit but are typically less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, and have lower access time and latency. Due to these reasons SSDs have become much more main stream in the last few years. File servers and storage arrays manufacturers use Flash and SSD devices as performance booster.
For example, EMC® offers FASTCache™ that is a large-capacity secondary tier of Flash-memory-based caching between storage system's fast limited capacity dynamic random access memory (DRAM) cache, and slower high capacity hard disk drives.
Similarly, NetApp® offers flash cards with intelligent caching mechanism named Performance Acceleration Module™ (PAM), to boost read intensive workloads.
The advanced ZFS™ file system may be configured to use SSD for the level 2 Adaptive Replacement Cache™ (L2ARC), as read only cache.
Distributed storage systems may include multiple nodes that include SSD caches. Once a node fails the entire content of the SSD cache is invalidated and its recovery is time and effort consuming.
There is a need to provide efficient methods systems and computer readable media that allow reconstruction of SSD cache after failure.